When’s the G7 Tweetup?

Inspired by Barack Obama’s success on Twitter and to a lesser degree, Gordon Brown, world leader’s are jumping on Twitter. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd joined Twitter last week. In fact, the PM claimed that so many followers joined, that his Twitter page crashed. Obviously, that seems pretty dubious in light of the fact that Al Gore joined Twitter and amassed over 5000 followers in an hour.

The most recent entrant is former Israeli Prime Minister and Likud Party leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu tweets in hebrew, but a new cool Twitter feature in search will translate all of his tweets with a click. Netanyahu has even copied Obama’s website style, it’s colors, fonts, videos, and icons.

Having witnessed the power of the web in the US presidential election campaign, world leaders are engaged in a high-tech arms race to win the hearts and minds of switched-on citizens. So friends to the north, where is Stephen Harper?

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Friday's Debate

The first of 4 Presidential debates will be held on Friday, September 26, 2008 at 9PM Eastern. with domestic policy focus from the campus of The University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS.

You may recall last February's Super Bowl when Jeremiah Owyang organized a fun side-game where we all rated the commercials on Twitter. Well, Jeremiah has a great idea to utilize Twitter to rate the debates in a similar fashion.  Be the Armchair political analyst and use Twitter to Score the Debate has all of the details and scoring examples.  It should make the debates even more enjoyable and meaningful.  Let's hope that Twitter is up to the task and the Fail Whale does not appear.

The Week in Review

The big stories on Twitter from last week:

Hurricane Gustav- Luckily the storm did not have the impact that we all feared. However, Twitter showed its value as a community and tool for fast distribution of news.  Andy Carvin put together the Hurricane Information Center, a social network devoted to the storm.But most of the communication was via Twitter. CNN's Rick Sanchez put Twitter on the network as they responded to the Twitterverse's questions, news and comments prior, during and after the storm on air. And New Orleans' own Mark Mayhew posted tweets and photos throughout the drama.

RNC08- The Republican National Convention was popular on Twitter all week, even spawning a "brandjacked" character, NotSarahPalin, with a somewhat humorous or painful perspective depending on your true color. There were also some pretty cool tools developed to report on the Twitter activities like one from CSPAN, Govtweets,  and Politweets.

Bye bye Fail Whale - As reported by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the necessary back end repairs to Twitter have been made and they are proud about their reliability improvements. In fact, Twitter had record uptime in August of 99.88%, down for less than an hour compared to May's 21.

They're using twitter and Qik in the house, oh wait, no they're not!

Since this issue broke on Wednesday, there has been alot more momentum and news on the issue, even in main stream media.  The Sunday NY Times has a great story about  Rep. Culberson and his quest to tweet from the house floor.  O'reilly News has an ongoing story which identifies the role of The Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan entity that is dedicated to the idea of bringing digital transparency to the United States Federal Government. The Sunlight Foundation has launched a great website where you can sign up to support the use of twitter on the house floor, see who's tweeting about it and track the story in the press.  I highly recommend joining them. There is a very interesting story coming out of the US House of Representatives that I learned about from Brian David Eisenberg in his blog. Progressive Congressmen John Culberson (R-TX) and Tim Ryan (D-OH) were using Twitter and Qik to communicate with their constituents right from the house floor. Unfortunately, the house has restricted the congressmen from using these tools as "official communications".  How Web 1.0/ command and control.  The leader of the complaint, my former congressman, Michael Capuano (D-MA). Congressman, you're not the mayor of Somerville anymore, but maybe you should be.  You can read more from the links from political bloggers, Andrew Wright, Aaron Brazell, and  Erin Kotecki Vest below. clipped from blog.infinitelymeta.com Congress trying to restrict Twitter, Qik, and other social media sites’ usage by Representatives? Ok. I saw a little bit of this break earlier today, but I’m just now catching up. I guess the word got out that John Culberson and Tim Ryan are using Twitter, Qik, and other socnets to interact in near real time with their constituents. Now apparently, there is a growing uproar of objection to using Twitter, Qik, and other social media outlets by representatives in Congress

clipped from twitter.com No more live Qk videos - no more live Tweets from the House floor or anywhere in the Capitol - no more www communication w/o prior approval about 19 hours ago from web johnculberson

clipped from andrewwright.wordpress.com Rep. Culberson just sent a series of messages on Twitter indicating that the Democratic House Leadership is requiring that he submit each message for approval prior to posting. This move apparently invokes a little-known broader regulation that all Member communications posted on any public social networking site receive prior approval. House Leadership Moves to Silence Twittering Members